Page 8 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Chapter 4

Livira

Yolanda did the tricky part. With the eye of her mind, she found each of the refugees among the settlement and set her will upon them, making phantoms of the world and reality of the phantoms. Livira did, she believed, most of the pushing. She felt herself a blunt weapon wielded by Yute’s daughter to strike the necessary blow. The impact sent more than a dozen people skipping through the years towards the day that Yolanda had chosen for them. In reaction Yolanda, Leetar, and Livira were sent hurtling back into a past even more distant than the one in which they’d found themselves. And true to Livira’s word, they pulled Leetar with them. And though it tore at Livira, they sent Jella with the rest, her last expression one of disbelief.

The world changed around them. The sun and moons blurred through the sky, peeling back the days so swiftly that the heavens became a vague eternal twilight. Storms came and went, averaging to a haze of dust constantly in the air. The rare rains fell without pause, joined into a single parsimonious drizzle that slightly dampened the air.

Huts rose and fell, rose and fell. The settlement expanded and contracted like a beating heart, and then without warning was gone, the well taken with it. Trees resurrected themselves from the ground. Ancient tapwoods springing erect before starting to diminish. Grass hurled itself across the Dust, swallowing it in an instant. Trees continued to appear full-grown, only to be sucked into the ground as if the earth itself were inhalingthem. Suddenly they too were gone, and the distant surface of a lake rippled high above, changing the quality of the light.

Twice the lake came and went. A road snaked past. A forest devoured it. The sun slowed its passage, light and dark blinking by faster than heartbeats. And with a jolt Livira staggered back, passing through the trunk of a tree before she caught herself.

It was daytime. Everything around her was green and soft and warm and moist and full of motion and the song of birds. If Livira had never seen the Exchange, she would have wept to see the forest. Even with that experience to steady her she stood in wonder. The Exchange had been order to this chaos. This was wild, untidy, crowded, cluttered, truly alive in a way that nothing Livira had seen had ever been.

“Where are we?” Leetar asked.

“Ten yards from the hut I was born in,” Livira said. She still saw Jella’s face and the first sense of betrayal dawning across it. But Livira had saved her. She had saved one of her classmates. Arpix lay in the worst kind of trouble, Meelan was dead, and Carlotte lost. But Jella she had saved.

“Ten yards and the best part of two millennia.” Yolanda stepped between them. “When you travel through the blood of an assistant—or more generally, when the library is involved, as it is with any journey through the Exchange, your first question shouldn’t be where, or even when, but why. The library associates, it organises. Not at the basic levels. It leaves the users to build shelves and arrange the books upon them. But at the higher levels it creates coincidence and brings together things which have consequence for each other.” The girl turned, exploring the undergrowth as if a clue might be concealed there. “We chose the direction of travel, but there is a reason we landed on this specific day. I can almost guarantee it.”

“What are we going to do?” Leetar asked, eyeing the shadowed forest with suspicion.

“We could go and see if the city is where we left it,” Livira said.

“You can find your way through all…this?” Leetar waved her arm at the green confusion pressing from every side.

“Up is a good start.” Livira rose smoothly through leaves and branches, reaching clear air within a few moments. An undulating carpet of treetopsstretched away in all directions, but the mountains, seemingly as impervious to time as the library itself, could be seen in the distance.

Yolanda appeared below Livira, towing Leetar by one hand. Leetar’s astonishment had shaped her mouth into an O and appeared to have overwhelmed any sense of fear.

“Curious.” A break in the arboreal pattern beneath her toes snagged Livira’s attention. She angled herself towards it.

Yolanda brought Leetar to Livira’s side. “A literal trail of destruction…”

A path had been forced through the forest below by something, or somethings, that were larger than the gaps between the trees would permit. Anything from saplings and bushes to trees whose trunks were as wide as Livira had been broken, uprooted, or otherwise trampled. The path wound around forest giants and left islands of larger trees midstream, but generally proceeded with a focused intent.

Livira descended to draw level with the forest’s upper limits and began to follow the path, taking her direction from the way the trunks lay. As she flew, she tried to imagine what had wrought such damage. It wasn’t the work of some great mechanism. She couldn’t see wheel tracks or the marks of saws and axes. And it looked to have been done some days ago. The greenery on snapped trees had wilted, but not yet become brown, let alone dried and fallen from the bough.

They followed the trail down a long slope, across a small river, and to a cleared area where a village lay in ruins amid trampled fields of crops. The devastation wasn’t limited to the buildings. Many inhabitants must have run, forewarned of the approach, but some had chosen to defend their homes or been too infirm to leave. It was impossible to tell which since the bodies lay scattered, the pieces too small and flyblown to tell young and hale from old and frail.

The path of demolished trees continued on the south side of the clearing, heading off in a new direction as if the village had been the intended destination and following its erasure a new target had been selected.

Livira shook her head, shivering despite the warmth of the day. “We’re days behind. We’re not going to catch up in a hurry.” Slowly at first, then faster, shrugging off the imagined bonds of gravity she rose into the air. Ifchallenged she would have claimed to be seeking perspective and a broader view. The truth was that she just wanted to get away from the mangled homes and the remains of the dead.

The heights offered nothing familiar save the mountains. A change of weather had given the Dust new clothes and rendered it unrecognisable.

“Come on.” Livira led off towards the valley in which Crath City would one day lie and whose rocky arms had cradled many other cities before Oanold’s ancestors started piecing the rubble back together. Thinking of the city pushed out images of the broken corpses behind her and replaced them with thoughts of Arpix, Neera, and Salamonda in the king’s keeping. The horror of it suddenly spiked through Livira, causing her to drop a dozen yards, tumbling, before her conviction caught her once more. She reminded herself that she wasn’t wasting time while the three of them suffered. Technically, they had not yet been captured and would not be for thousands of years yet.

Yolanda and Leetar caught up with Livira as she regained lost height. Leetar was still being towed, lacking the belief required to keep herself aloft. Treetops blurred beneath them as they arrowed towards the mountains faster than a galloping horse. Livira found herself wondering whether any limits were placed upon her in this form, or if the only bounds were her expectations and imagination. She had discovered flight by herself but was shamed that she had had to be shown that time was just another path to walk, another direction to take.

The world around her now seemed every bit as real as the smoke-filled reading room she’d left behind, but somehow the gift of godlike powers not only reduced it in scale but made it seem less important. The fact that she could span vast distances in inconsequential amounts of time, that she could soar to the heavens and see kingdoms spread below her like a map, that she could pass unseen, walk through walls, spy in the mightiest of halls…all of it sucked the importance out of the place. It made it into a toy.

Livira gained still more height, soaring so that the trees merged into one vast greenness and the limits of the forest came into view. She could see that no city sat where Crath City and its predecessors had laid theirfoundations only to burn time and again. However, before the mountains’ feet, the forest surrendered to patchwork farmland, and on a plateau only a few miles to the south sat a citadel with the skirts of a city reaching out from the cliffs’ base.

Livira angled herself down towards this unexpected metropolis. The plateau had been named Arthran in her time. Livira recalled the fact only from a map that hung in Deputy Ellis’s office. Of the civilisation that once grew there, she knew nothing.

As she descended, the citadel opened itself to her, more of a walled city within a city than some fortress squatting above the masses. Rooftops resolved into buildings, flecks of green became gardens, lines broadened into streets, dots became carriages, horses, and people.

Despite being more city than fortress, the place appeared to have been recently called to arms. Powerful ballistae had been positioned at regular intervals on the citadel walls, with smaller ones stationed on every available tower and rooftop. Had she approached on foot, Livira might not even have noticed it. The oversized crossbows appeared to be aimed at defending the populace from the sky. Even knowing herself to be invisible and insubstantial Livira knew a moment’s fear at the thought of one of those spears being launched her way.

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